“Create, Communicate and Deliver Value to a Target market at a Profit.”

Marketing begins with the customer. And the mantra above is all about customers and the value that they feel from their experience with your brand.

Create value for customer

This is about product management. You have to come up with a product or service that is one of a kind in the eyes of your customers. These days, however, your designers and engineers are not the only resource that you can turn to for coming up with a new and innovative product.

In this era of open innovation, more and more customers or raving fans of your product are chipping in to define the next big thing. Take Procter & Gamble for instance. When the consumer goods giant wanted to develop Pringles Print, they searched the web to find a professor-turned-baker in Italy who had already done it for his pizza and cookies.

Communicate value to customer

Communication is about the business of brand management. Customers love to identify with your brand if they really like it. Harley lovers even tattoo the logo on their skin!

What is your brand promise? Do you really deliver on that promise through actual customer experience? Is your business differentiated? Are you the best? What are your unique selling points?

Deliver value to customer

Value delivery is about customer management. Do you know who your customers are? Do you understand their pains, needs, and wants? Can you deliver value to fulfill the wishes of your customers?

In order for your marketing activities to be successful, you need to master these three businesses: Creation, Communication, and Delivery of Value (CCDV)–product management, brand management, and customer management.

Too much of the world lacks access to clean drinking water. Engineer Michael Pritchard did something about it — inventing the portable Lifesaver filter, which can make the most revolting water drinkable in seconds. An amazing demo from TEDGlobal 2009.

My 2 cents: Distributed rules! Think about it. Globalization, division of labor, parallel processing in computer chips, routing of data packets, and so forth. Let me call it a LifeSaver approch to delivering clean water, one bottle at a time. You can get clean, sterile drinking water when and where you want it. Way to go!

Hans Rosling unveils new data visuals that untangle the complex risk factors of one of the world’s deadliest (and most misunderstood) diseases: HIV. He argues that preventing transmissions — not drug treatments — is the key to ending the epidemic.

As a doctor and researcher, Hans Rosling identified a new paralytic disease induced by hunger in rural Africa. Now the global health professor is looking at the bigger picture, increasing our understanding of social and economic development with the remarkable trend-revealing software he created.

“Hybrid cars are like mermaids. When you want a fish, you get a woman. And when you need a woman, you get a fish.”

Shai Agassi, who used to be the heir apparent at SAP AG and whom I had the privilege to meet in person three times, wants to put you behind the wheel of an electric car — but he doesn’t want you to sacrifice convenience (or cash) to do it.

Shai’s business model falls under what I call the “Land of Free” category where doing something makes more sense than ownership. On the other side of the scale, you can find the “Highland of Premium,” where owndership (or having something) and experience count.

David G. Thomson, management guru and founder and Chairman of Blueprint Growth Institute, Inc., found that the secret blueprint to a billion dollars or more in revenue is none other than an exponential growth with escape velocity at 50 million dollars.